Ok, do you remember the previous posts about meteo station? If not, go to the PART ONE and PART TWO!

Now, it’s time to connect ….the webcam! TA-DA!

I chose a very popular webcam by Logitech (…why? simply because it is cheap and it is natively supported by Debian and Raspbian!): the model is the well known C170, and I bought it on Amazon.it for approx. 19 euros.

The famous 🙂 Logitech C170

The connection to Raspberry is very simple: connect it to one USB port of Raspi before the board power on, then after the Raspi boot sequence it should be automatically mapped on /dev/video0 device.

I will use mjpg-streamer to remotely view the webcam stream, so we must to execute some preliminary (but necessary) step.

Firstly we must install SVN client, since mjpg-streamer is not in the Raspbian repository.

#sudo apt-get install subversion

Secondly we must download the mjpg-streamer sources in the Raspberry disk.

The last argument is the local folder where the sources will be saved.

IMPORTANT NOTE: some day ago the svn repository for mjpg-stream should be changed, so svn command should return an error reporting also the NEW svn repository path. You should relaunch svn command using the new/right svn repository path.

After this we must also install libjpeg8-dev and imagemagick.

#sudo apt-get install libjpeg8-dev

#sudo apt-get install imagemagick

After this, we must compile mjpg-streamer entering the folder /home/pi/mjpg-streamer (the sources location) and launch the old (very old 🙂 ) make command.

Cross the fingers ;-)….. and voilà, les jeux sont faits! 🙂

In order to remotely view (i.e. inside Firefox or IE) we must now activate the webserver provided by mjpg-streamer.

The command line (a little difficult to read but it works very well in my case) is:

-o defines the output mode configuration (in this case the http is used)

-p defines the http port (in my case 8090)

-w defines the root for the webserver (where the webpages are placed)

Finally, note that the command should be launched in background (using the “&”).

Note also that some error will appear at command launch because C170 webcam doesn’t support all mjpg-streamer features (i.e. zoom), but NO PANIC. It should work correctly (I hope 😉 ).

Now…the test: type in your browser the following address http://192.168.0.x:8090 (where x is the address of your Raspberry) and you should see the demo page of mjpg-streamer with inside the stream image of your webcam. The live stream can be viewed in the subpages “Stream” or “Javascript”. For my meteo station I modified one of the demo pages in order to add the refresh of meteo data arriving from Arduino….but you will see this in the next episodes! 😉

This is rear garden of my house using mjpg-streamer…it’s a very strange view (from the ground) for my C170:

Well…the meteo data on the left of frame will be argument of the next posts! 😉

What’s Montecchio? Ehmmm…that’s the name of the place where I will install the meteo station when it will be ready! 😉

OK, last recommendation: if you want to start automatically the mjpg-streamer webserver, you have to add the above command line to /etc/rc.local, as usual.

…Wellllll! 🙂

All good today, without pain. Strange, very strange…. 😉

So, the work on meteo station is more or less terminated: the only things to activate for full functionalities are

the web page containg at the same time the webcam stream asnd the meteo data took from Arduino via I2C

the internet access of Raspberry using a 3G dongle with the aid of a Dynamic DNS service.

…But I ensure you that the difficult parts are already passed without (so high) difficulties.